With only more issue of Dark Nights: Metal to go, everything is coming to a head. However, there are still many mysteries to be solved, not least of which is regarding the mysterious bandaged prisoner of The Batman Who Laughs.

Whoever it is has been dragged around by The Dark Knights to witness the death of the Multiverse, but this week’s tie-in Dark Knights Rising: The Wild Hunt gives us a few clues to piece together the identity of the mysterious prisoner. And, if we’re right, he really is the most powerful person in the DC Multiverse.

Monitor Duty

The one-shot jumps around the DC Multiverse as the Dark Knights hunt Cyborg, Raven and The Flash aboard the Ultima Thule, the shiftship first introduced in Final Crisis: Superman Beyond. The Ultimate Thule is said to be searching for its pilot, Nix Uotan AKA The Superjudge, the last of the Monitors and the man who assembled Operation: Justice Incarnate to save The Multiverse from The Gentry. One of these heroes, Intellectron, even makes a cameo as the Ultimate Thule evades The Dark Knights’ Carrier.

Later, when The Dark Knights gloat over their impending victory, The Batman Who Laughs makes his prisoner watch, referring to him as “the most powerful being in The Multiverse, perhaps.” While we still don’t see his face, we can his eyes, and there’s something familiar about them, as if he’s been in a similar situation before. The last clue that points to the prisoner’s identity comes in the form of the simian allies who arrive on the last page, which include Mister Stubbs, the sidekick and partner of, you guessed it, Nix Uotan.

With so many clues all pointing in the same direction, it’s hard not to make the connection that the prisoner is in fact Nix Uotan, the guardian of the Multiverse, brought down by the Dark Knights and forced to watch his life’s work destroyed by creatures from other side.

Superjudge!

Nix Uotan was first introduced in the lead-up to Final Crisis, so it makes sense that Grant Morrison was brought in to work on this one-shot, which focuses on some of the writer's more heady multiversal concepts. After his Earth — Earth 51 — was destroyed, Nix Uotan was cast out by The Monitors and forced to live as a human, searching for his way back to a life he couldn’t quite remember. He was taken prisoner by Darkseid and placed in The Evil Factory alongside Batman and Metron, but he was able to regain his godhood, defeat Mandrakk, The Dark Monitor — formerly his father Rox Ogama — and bring new stability to the Multiverse.

Nix Uotan became the sole protector of The Multiverse, operating out of the House of Heroes at its center, where he recruited superpowered beings from a myriad of worlds to stop a threat greater than anything anyone had ever faced before in The Gentry and their leader, The Empty Hand. Poisoned by The Anti-Death Equation, Uotan was twisted into becoming a new Dark Monitor until he was saved by the heroes of the Multiverse and drove back the invaders, but now it seems a new set of invaders from the Dark Multiverse have got the better of him.

If Barbatos truly plans to supplant the Multiverse with the Dark Multiverse, having his minions kidnap Nix Uotan would make sense as the first thing he’d command, so don’t be surprised if the prisoner is revealed as the Superjudge as Metal reaches its conclusion next month.